by Ben Adams
“Gentlemen.” Colonel Hollister walked up to them, holding the journal at his waist with both hands. “Did you really think you could escape?”
The sheriff laughed like he just remembered a joke and wanted to share it.
“Do you find something funny, Sheriff Masters?”
“Yeah,” the sheriff said, smirking. “You need to know something. Everything you’ve been doing, all the cover-ups, that reporter kid’s murder, they’re about to be blown wide open. We’re supposed to meet a member of the press in Santa Fe, and if we don’t show, Leadbelly’s story’s gonna be published in tomorrow’s paper.”
“No, it won’t,” John said.
Between two Humvees, the click of a Zippo. Embers of a lit cigarette glowed, a small, orange circle in the darkness. John had never seen him before, but he knew who he was. The only person who knew their escape route.
“Why don’t you just get out here?” John said, defeated. All his plans and hopes for escaping from town, the case, his job, were edited away to nothing.
A man, standing between two Humvees, stepped into the light. He wore a dark blue suit, casually smoking among starched uniforms.
“Rex Grant,” John said, “the minute I saw the Hummers, I knew you’d sold me out. How long have you been selling information to the Air Force?”
“I didn’t sell them anything,” he said. “I work for them.”
“John,” Colonel Hollister said, “I’d like to introduce you to Lieutenant Rex Grant, head of the Air Force Special Services, Propaganda Department, specializing in plausible deniability, or as they’re more commonly known, The National Enquirer.”
“You see,” Lieutenant Grant said, walking closer, taking a drag off his cigarette, “people want to believe there’s more to the world than what they see, that something is being kept from them. My job is to give them a version that’s just enough reality, just enough fantasy to keep them making the wrong guesses, distracting them from the work we really do.”
“You used me. You lied to me,” John said. He’d been betrayed by someone who created stories of snow monsters pitching in the World Series and conveyed them as legitimate news.
“Don’t feel bad. We’ve been doing this for years, since Roswell, when we went by our original name, Majestic-12.”
“I knew Majestic-12 was real,” Professor Gentry said, like having his assumptions confirmed was a personal triumph.
“We had to change it,” Lieutenant Grant said. He dropped his cigarette, twisted it into the dirt with his shoe. “It sounded too conspiratorial, like an actual government program. The National Enquirer sounds more credible, don’t you think?”
“You used me,” John said. “You used Rooftop.”
“We needed an impartial third party to research the Elvis pictures, just in case we found one of the body doubles.”
“You already found him, had people staking out his trailer.”
“Colonel Hollister’s men tend to be a little heavy handed.” He glanced at the soldier who shot up the car.
“When you showed at Leadbelly’s trailer,” Colonel Hollister said, “I expected you to be a typical detective, a bottom feeder, but instead I got you. I got an Abernathy.”
“So, did you trick me into coming down so you could kill me, too? like that kid in the desert? Has this whole thing been a giant set-up?” John asked, taking a step forward. A soldier put his hand on John’s chest, attempting to restrain him. John knocked it away. Guns were raised at the edge of his vision, and John grinned and thought about how he could release a pheromone that would cause the heavily armed soldiers to make out with each other.
“John, I didn’t know how special you are,” Lieutenant Grant said.
“Special? I just write puzzles,” John said. He stared at Rex Grant, wishing Sagittarians had laser vision.
“I don’t have the proper clearance. And I never used your name in any of my reports. Colonel Hollister didn’t even know I’d contracted you to investigate the photo. He only briefed me on you after you showed at Leadbelly’s trailer.”
“What about the reporter? Did you have a file on him, too?”
“The kid was never real. Talking on the phone, I knew you’d never come down here. So we fabricated the story, found some drifter, someone no one would miss, cleaned him up, dressed him like a college kid, shot him, and left his body by the road, somewhere he could be found. Local cops did all the paperwork, making him bait. You gave me everything I needed when you asked if I’d sent a reporter down here. Now that kid is dead because of you.”
“You don’t get to put this on me,” John said. “I’m not the one that uses people. That’s you.” The blood from the bar fight had been washed from his fingers, but he still saw the man lying on the floor, blood seeping between the floorboards. Without realizing it, John wiped his hand on his pants leg. The solider next to him lightly tapped his fingers against his rifle.
“Well, Al Leadbelly,” Colonel Hollister said. “I have you at last, the first one, his closest companion. It’s been over thirty-five years since we buried Elvis and you haven’t changed a bit.”
“Really? Thirty-five years looking like that? That’s not really something to be proud of,” John said, cranky, like an old man on the bus needing a nap, but not wanting to fall asleep for fear that teenagers would draw dicks on his face.
“Did you think someone as special as you could stay hidden? Eventually someone would take your picture, send it to Lieutenant Grant. And we’d be on your trail again.”
“Man, I knew you couldn’t stay away.”
“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other, Al. I have thirty-five years of questions and I guarantee you’re not going to like how I ask them.”
“You might want to get in line, man. I got a few ex-wives looking to do the exact same thing.”
“Always joking. Just like Elvis.”
“He had a great sense of humor, didn’t he?” Professor Gentry said.
“Professor Gentry, it’s good to see you again. Elvis really valued your insight, your trust. It’s a shame you betrayed him, sold him out for a book deal. I’m sorry we had to discredit you. You gave us no other choice.”
“You must not have worked that hard,” John said.
“We were all working overtime those days, trying to figure out what happened to Elvis. How a man in his condition could die from a heart attack.”
“His condition?” John said. “That coked-up asshole?”
Colonel Hollister backhanded John across the face. Blood ran from the split in John’s lip, into his mouth. He leaned over. Spat. Colonel Hollister clutched John’s hair and tilted his head back. Blood retreated back into John’s lip. The cut sealed.
“Brilliant,” Colonel Hollister said, releasing John’s hair, pushing his head back. “I’m glad Lieutenant Grant called you, John. I really am. I’m going to really enjoy your autopsy findings. I’ve always been curious about how your kind actually works.”
“It’s a healthy combination of cynicism and PBR. But mostly PBR.”
“Do you know what it’s like to lose a child, John? Of course not, how could you? It’s devastating, something you never get over. You’re constantly wondering if there was something you could have done, questioning your parenting. If I’d only been there for him. Elvis was like a son to me.”
“Yeah,” John said, “a son on Quaaludes.”
“In some ways he was more. So, I’ve been searching for answers,” Colonel Hollister turned to Leadbelly, “searching for you.”
“Whatever answers I can give you,” Leadbelly said, “they won’t bring him back, man.”
“You’re right. I know. But killing John Abernathy will help.”
“Wait. What? Leadbelly?” John’s head spun between Leadbelly and Colonel Hollister. John thought they only wanted Leadbelly, to dangle him above a pool of bionic piranhas and question him about Elvis, but seeing Colonel Hollister absorbing the moment, John finally understood that Leadbelly w
asn’t their only objective.
“John, you know who you are, man,” Leadbelly said over his shoulder as two soldiers led him toward a Hummer.
John rubbed the top of his hand, where his bones pushed through his skin, right before he’d punched Leadbelly. It didn’t feel any different, the skin, thin hairs, the veins and ligaments. It felt like the hand he’d used his whole life for everything from writing puzzles to zipping up his pants to turning the pages of Archibald Abernathy’s journal. But his hand wasn’t the same. He had watched its reconstruction, the bones breaking through the skin, gloving it, then receding. And it wasn’t just his hand that had adapted. When he confronted Leadbelly at the lumberyard, and after the bar fight, John had worried that he was becoming something foreign and unrecognizable, but looking at his great-great-uncle being led away in handcuffs, John knew he shouldn’t have worried, that Leadbelly was right. He knew who he was. He was the descendant of Archibald Abernathy and Louisa Ramirez. Part human. Part Sagittarian.
“Wait, I want Leadbelly to see this,” Colonel Hollister said. “So he’ll remember.” Colonel Hollister motioned to the soldiers standing next to them.
“On your knees,” a soldier, the one who had fought with the sheriff at Levi’s, said.
“Like hell!” Sheriff Masters cried.
“I said, on your knees.” The soldier rammed the sheriff’s lower back with the butt of his rifle, forcing him to the ground, then did the same to Professor Gentry.
Another soldier smashed his gun into John’s shoulder, forcing him to his knees.
“You ruptured my friend’s eye socket,” he said to John.
“You know that wasn’t me, right?” John said.
“He’ll never be able to go into the field again.”
“That was literally a whole barroom full of people.”
“Colonel Hollister wasn’t going to let me come on this mission. He said I was too emotionally invested. I had to beg him for this assignment.”
“I was unconscious for the whole thing.”
“I wanted to be the one that put a bullet in your head. When I’m done with you, I’m gonna find your girlfriend and do the same to her.”
The journal mentioned a town. Oscar Ramirez had taken Archibald there. It was where he met Louisa, and a young Rosa. And John realized that’s where Rosa went, not to Albuquerque, but to a town that had been hidden for hundreds of years. A town where she could be safe.
“Hollister!” the sheriff shouted, offering a final argument. “I’m the local sheriff, the law! You can’t do this!”
“I am sorry about this, Sheriff. I really am,” Colonel Hollister said with insincere remorse. “I try to limit collateral damage, but you see, I’m fighting a war. We’ve been invaded, attacked. There have been casualties. I’m just trying to protect humanity.”
John calmly looked up at Colonel Hollister, adjusted his glasses, and said evenly, “You are fucking crazy.”
The mountains were silhouetted behind them, palpable and ominous, like a housewife’s premonition. The lights from the trucks shone in John’s eyes. He saw outlines of the bodies of the men in front of him, and from behind him John heard the unmistakable click of guns being cocked.
John told himself to calm down, that he could do this. It would be just like when he punched Leadbelly in the motel room. Except that had happened automatically, like a reflex. He hadn’t willed it. But that didn’t matter. He was a Sagittarian. He could do this. He just had to concentrate.
The men behind them slowed their breathing, detached from the present moment.
John closed his eyes and concentrated on how he wanted the soldiers to feel, lethargic, content, exhausted, like taking a nap in the middle of the desert was the best idea they’d ever had. John focused on the scents associated with those emotions. He grimaced and grunted, focusing these precise feelings and pheromones outward, infusing the atmosphere with the aroma of transformed awareness. Then, thinking he’d succeeded, he sighed, and waited for the sound of unconscious bodies collapsing.
And he waited.
And waited.
“Gentleman,” Colonel Hollister said, his calm and pleased voice slicing the silence, “fire at will.”
John opened his eyes. Colonel Hollister stood above him sneering, pointing a gun at John’s head.
“Oh, shit.”
At the sight of Colonel Hollister aiming his gun at him, John knew he’d failed to release his pheromones. He sniffed the air around them. It smelled like gunpowder and automotive fluids and sweat, not like an enchanting aroma that would have caused trained soldiers to slip into a wilderness snooze. John sat back on his heels and dropped his head. His pheromones were their last hope of leaving the desert alive. He had failed.
John gazed past the colonel, to the stars behind him. This was the last time he’d see them. He wanted to absorb the stars, memorize their celestial positions. He suddenly regretted not taking Constellation Cross Stitch 203. He could have embroidered all the constellations in glow-in-the-dark yarn and hung them from his wall.
The stars flickered yellow, then red, back and forth like a freshly struck match. Old constellations burned.
Then they moved.
The stars moved, not straight across the sky like shooting stars, but in bizarre, zigzag patterns, floating back and forth in pairs, synchronized, sky-bound vessels passing, signaling. One pair, then two, then three. They moved erratically and John lost count of how many pairs streaked and darted above him.
And he wasn’t the only one who noticed. Colonel Hollister yelled at his men to take cover. Soldiers ran behind Hummers, pointing their guns skyward. Most of them had seen combat in some Middle East desert, had been hardened by IEDs and stop-loss redeployments, but the sight of descending stars caused them to speak to each other in hushed uncertainties. John didn’t see or hear any of this. He kept looking up, watching the lights get larger until they were the size of the moon.
Machineguns fired. Shells were ejected as new rounds were pushed into the chamber, fired in a futile attempt to shoot out the stars. The hot casings hit John’s head.
John, Sheriff Masters, and Professor Gentry fell to the ground. The sheriff tried saying something, but John couldn’t hear him over the gunfire. He motioned that they should get out of there. John nodded. They got to their feet and, bent over, ran to the Humvees.
“Were you hit?” Sheriff Masters asked him when they reached the vehicles. They crouched next to dusty doors and tires, shielded from the chaos.
“You?” John asked, shaking his head.
“I’m good. What the hell’s going on?”
“I think it’s Leadbelly’s cavalry.”
The soldiers, illuminated by Humvee headlights, fired their weapons skyward as the lights above them grew and encapsulated the vehicles, forming a dome around them.
“Can you see Leadbelly?” the sheriff asked.
“Yeah, he’s over there.” John pointed across the field of shell casings and astounded soldiers to the Humvees behind the John’s car. Leadbelly was looking up at the sky, smiling.
“Let’s get him and get outta here while they’re all distracted.”
They made their way around the back, to the other side of the circle, where Leadbelly stood. The soldier guarding him was in the middle of the vehicles, shooting upward.
“Leadbelly, Leadbelly.” Sheriff Masters got his attention.
“Sheriff. John. Man, I told you everything’d be alright.”
“Let’s take one of these Hummers,” Professor Gentry said, “get outta here.”
“Naw, man, this here’s my ride.”
The lights kept getting larger.
The soldiers stopped firing and stood frozen, confused, staring up at the glowing dome a few feet above them. There was no wind. Everything was still. The only movement was smoke rising from lowered gun barrels.
Shaking his wrists, Leadbelly unlocked his shackles.
“You pick up a few tricks working Vegas, man,” he said,
handing Sheriff Masters the handcuffs.
“You get that from a magician?” the sheriff asked.
“No, man, the assistant.” Leadbelly winked. “C’mon, man, let’s get outta here. Unless you wanna hang out with these fellas.”
They followed him to the destroyed Saturn. A pair of lights broke rank from the dome and descended into the ring of gun smoke. The light’s source was a long, rectangular box, twenty-five feet long, ten feet high, and seven feet across. Windows were on the front and sides. Its rear lowered, leveled.
The box landed in front of them.
Along the bottom, large, metal spikes crept up the frame, six on each side. They climbed the walls, connecting the box to two large metal domes underneath. Between the RV and the metal domes, green lights glowed. On the side of the box were three windows and a door with a small window. Two tan stripes ran the length of its white frame, with one end of stripes meeting the word ‘Indian’ at the rear. The other end forming a ‘W’ under the passenger seat window.
‘W’ for ‘Winnebago’.
The flying Winnebago floated just above the ground, not disturbing the earth underneath. The driver waved at them with a big, friendly smile. He looked just like Leadbelly, big hair, sequined jumpsuit. He honked the horn. The first few notes of an Elvis classic, ‘You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog’, performed by car horn, ended the silence. The side door opened and hinged metal steps unfolded.
“C’mon, man,” Leadbelly said. “Let’s go.”
They followed Leadbelly past bewildered soldiers gazing at the light dome or the flying Winnebago. John shook his head and chuckled. When he saw the lights encasing them, he thought their rescue would be a little more science-fiction, little green men in flying saucers, and a little less Reno-road-trip.
